Recently, VMBlog asked Red Hat for some predictions for 2014 for trends in IaaS, Virtualization, and OpenStack. Find some of my thoughts here: http://vmblog.com/archive/2013/12/12/red-hat-2014-predictions-promise-turned-into-reality-enterprise-iaas-adoption-in-2014.aspx

Today was set up day at the Red Hat booth and in the OpenStack Quad where the expo takes place. It is very exciting to see this all come together. Not only does it represent six months of hard work from multiple teams at Red Hat (engineering, Open Source community, events, product management, product marketing, creative, press and analyst relations, and more), but it also represents a major shift in the OpenStack project maturity. OpenStack just feels bigger now. There was a sense of that in Portland when we moved from venues inside hotels to a real conference center, and it is solidified with our move to Hong Kong, a real world city, and the beautiful AsiaWorld Expo venue.

Hard to believe it’s been six months since Portland, but it has. And the Red Hat team and I have been busy with RDO, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure.

If you are going to be at OpenStack Summit Hong Kong, please be sure to stop by our Booth #A3 to meet Red Hat OpenStack rock star engineers, and catch a sneak peek at the work we have been doing to make OpenStack more installable and manageable.

UPDATE: The discount code is EXPIRED and OpenStack Summit is SOLD OUT! I hope you got your tickets early. See you there.

Red Hat is a Headline sponsor at OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon next month. There was an early bird registration, which is now over. If you missed it, Red Hat is offering attendees at discount on the current registration price: $450 instead of $600, a savings of $150 per attendee.

To get the discount visit the Eventbrite portal and during the registration process you will see a section prompting you to enter a promotional code above the green “Register” button.

I will be there as well as a ton of Red Hatters, those who have been making massive contributions to the OpenStack project code, as well as those of us who work on the business side. We will have plenty of great giveaways, and expect some cool news as well.

Here is a great presentation from Jon Benedict at NetApp on combining Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and NetApp technologies to host your Oracle 11g database workloads. Jon gave this tech talk at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 and it was very well received. Enjoy!

Red Hat partners in Canada cannot keep up with the demand for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Last month, I presented on RHEV 3.0 and 3.1 in Montreal and Toronto. Our partners at Savoir Faire Linux recorded the event and recently posted on YouTube. Check it out!

Red Hat had a great time in Barcelona at VMworld Europe last week. We were showing RHEV 3.1 beta and answering lots of questions from folks who are interested in alternatives to VMware vSphere.

It was also cool to meet Brent Spiner, Star Trek’s Commander Data himself, who was reprising his VMworld appearance from San Francisco again at the Barcelona show. And one of my colleagues managed to snap this photo of Mr. Spiner wearing a Red Hat:

I arrived yesterday in beautiful Barcelona for VMworld Europe. Out my airplane window, I caught a glimpse of the Red Hat logo emblazoned on a field on the landing path for the airport. Very cool.

The interest in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization continues to grow, especially now that we’re heading toward RHEV 3.1 release at the end of the year. The beta program, open to existing RHEV customers or through Red Hat partners and direct sales, is going very well. For more on the features and functionality in RHEV 3.1, see my previous post from Red Hat Summit.

Last month, I did a short trip through Eastern Canada to meet with customers and partners in Montreal and Toronto. One theme came shining through: customers are ready to diversify their virtualization infrastructure, and are looking to RHEV to do it. Even though VMware rightly eliminated the VRAM pricing for vSphere 5.0 and 5.1, customers are still concerned about being locked in to a single vendor, and are still waiting for the promised savings from virtualizing their workloads. Now is a great time to be checking out alternatives like RHEV.

One is the growth of the use of RHEV, at least among this audience, is remarkable given our short time on the market. And combined with the use of generic Linux KVM is tied with the overall use of opensource Xen and Citrix XenServer among Zenoss users. While I’d like to see more use of RHEV, obviously, it’s another testament to the momentum behind KVM and RHEV.

The second interesting point is the momentum behind OpenStack. Fully 50% of respondents say they have deployed an OpenStack open source cloud. The greatest barrier to open sound cloud adoption is maturity, followed by lack of support and concerns around security.

Many of your already know that Red Hat has been involved with OpenStack for over a year. We were the number 3 contributer to Essex and have stepped up our involvement since then, announcing that we were joining the OpenStack Foundation as a Platinum member and releasing a Preview of our OpenStack distribution running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. To join the preview, go to http://openstack.redhat.com/

One of the reasons that Red Hat has joined the OpenStack community is that many of our customers are very excited about OpenStack, but have expressed many of the same concerns that Zenoss uncovered in their research. Making OpenStack stable, supportable, and secure is key to its broad adoption, and the skills required to do that are what Red Hat has demonstrated many times in the open source community, beginning with our enterprise grade Linux and virtualization solutions.

Our OpenStack Preview will soon be updated from the Essex release to the Folsom release (which just came out a week or so ago). Folsom will form the basis of our product release early next year.

To learn more about Red Hat’s OpenStack strategy, check out our OpenStack FAQ. And if you’re in San Diego next week for OpenStack Summit, come stop by our booth and meet me and some of our OpenStack engineers. We will be presenting at the Summit as well, including information on our release strategy.

Red Hat Summit was an amazing event for Red Hat, open source, and open virtualization.

I’ll be writing up my thoughts real-soon-now, but in the meantime, take a look at this video of my friend Andy Cathrow and me talking about the value of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and the roadmap for RHEV 3.1. I’ve been told it’s good, but honestly I can’t stand to watch myself on video so I’ve not watched it.

I present a couple of interesting slides towards the end of my presentation on value for performance that I’ll talk more about this week.